7385840
submission
CNETNate writes:
Last.fm has streamed an incredible 275,000 years of audio around the world, and it's most popular songs are packed onto SSD-powered servers to completely eliminate some of the problems associated with streaming from platter-based hard disks. This detailed interview with Last.fm's Matthew Ogle, the company's head of Web development, explains some of the facts and figures behind the global music service. From the article: "We stream all music directly off our servers in London. We have a cluster of streaming nodes including a bunch of powerful machines with solid-state hard drives. We have a process that runs daily which finds the hottest music and pushes those tracks on to the SSDs streamers that sit in front of our regular platter-based streaming machines. That way, if someone is listening to one of our more popular stations, the chances are really good that these songs are coming off our high-speed SSD machines. They're fast because every song is sitting in memory instead of being on a slow, spinning platter."
7217060
submission
CNETNate writes:
Most of us assume modern life is the peak of human achievement, but is it really? We decided to take a look at the major technologies of the modern world and compare them to their closest equivalent of pre-digital mankind — Facebook vs dinner parties, World of Warcraft vs actual war craft, iPhones vs hills on fire — and the results are surprising. And slightly dumb, so laugh.
7071126
submission
CNETNate writes:
Do Opera Mobile, Skyfire or Mozilla's Fennec have the power to take down the BlackBerry browser, IE on Windows Mobile or Safari on the iPhone? This lengthy test aimed to find out. Speed, Acid3 compliance, Javascript rendering capabilities and general subjective usability were all tested and reviewed. So was Opera Mini and the default Symbian browser actually, but these two were unable to complete some of the tests and benchmarks.
6835046
submission
CNETNate writes:
You'll laugh, but mostly you'll cry. Some of the questions Google gets asked to deliver results for is beyond worrying. 'Can you put peroxide in your ear?', 'Why would a pregnancy test be negative?', and 'Why can't I own a Canadian?' being just a selection of the truly baffling — and disturbing — questions Google is regularly forced to answer.
6805238
submission
CNETNate writes:
Is the American mains socket really so much worse than the Italian design? And does the Italian socket fail at rivaling the sockets in British homes? This feature explores, in a not-at-all-parodic-and-anecdotal fashion, the designs, strengths and weaknesses of Earth's mains adapters. There is only one conclusion, and you're likely not to agree if you live in France. Or Italy. Or in fact most places.
6781330
submission
CNETNate writes:
With its own file server for uploaded Hollywood blockbusters, a 10Mbps Internet connection to Earth and a stock of IBM ThinkPad notebooks for sending emails, the amount of consumer technology aboard the $150 billion International Space Station is impressive. Yet it's the responsibility of just two guys to maintain the uptime of the Space Station's IT, and they have given an in-depth interview with CNET to explain what tech's aboard, how it works and whether Windows viruses are a threat to the astronauts. In a related feature, the Space Station's internal network (which operates over just bandwidth of just1Mbps) and its connected array of Lenovo notebooks is explained, along with the future tech we could see aboard the traveling colony as it traverses the future.
6496159
submission
CNETNate writes:
UK customers have been reporting that they received their copies of Windows 7 in the mail today. Currently the British postal service is threatening industrial action over pay, and planned walkouts may result in Windows 7 not being delivered on its release date. It is understood that Microsoft has agreed to let some retailers send out copies early to avoid disappointment, and to make the UK the first country in the world to have Windows 7 in customers' hands.
